Any discussion of prior art throughout the specification should in no way be considered as an admission that such prior art is widely known or forms part of common general knowledge in the field.
Companies are increasingly relying on self-service terminals to provide their customers with goods or services. In some cases, the self-service terminals replace employee operated terminals or employee provided services. The self-service terminals are typically available for use by customers 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. Examples include automatic teller machines (ATMs), kiosks (e.g., DVD rental, airport and hotel check in, etc.), and self-service point-of-sale terminals.
A customer's level of satisfaction with a company can be directly related to the availability of self-service and assisted service terminals used by the company to provide products and/or services to the customer. Therefore, a failure in one or more of these terminals that renders it unavailable to a customer and result in missed sales, missed opportunities to provide services, lower customer satisfaction and loss of customers.
What is needed is a system that reliably predicts a failure in a self-service or assisted service terminal and enables a corrective action to be taken prior to the failure.